Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein, Editors

Jewish American Literature

From the early settlers to Broadway lyricists to today's great writers—a redefinition of a vital American literary tradition.

This rich anthology reconsiders Jewish American literature from its seventeenth-century origins to its flourishing present. It gathers the work of 145 writers in all genres—fiction, poetry, drama, essays, journals, autobiography, song lyrics, and cartoons. Here readers will find the petitions and memoirs of the first Sephardic settlers, the Yiddish and English voices of the great era of immigration, modernist writers exploring their Americanness, and activist writers working for change. Here too is the generation of writers and poets who define postwar American literature—Arthur Miller, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth—and a younger generation—Art Spiegelman, Jacqueline Osherow, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Allegra Goodman—whose work makes clear that Jewish American literature continues to thrive.

This collection shows as never before how literature has played a vital role in shaping and passing down the legacies of "the people of the book."